People are amassing an ever increasing amount of digital “stuff”. Such stuff may include digital documents, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, videos, music, and other digital information. Until very recently, the primary way people stored all of their digital stuff was on their personal computing devices. For example, a person's digital photo collection may have been stored only on the hard drive of their laptop computer. In some cases, the photo collection may have been backed up to a personal backup storage device (e.g., an external hard drive).
Today, with the near-ubiquity of high-speed Internet connectivity and the rise of mobile computing, people are now using online content management services to store their digital stuff online. In this arrangement, a person's digital information is stored on servers operated by the online content management service and connected to the Internet or other network. Storing digital information with online content management services provides a number of benefits. For one, users may be able to store more stuff than they can on their personal computing devices. For example, an online content management service may offer a terabyte (TB) of storage capacity of more, while the hard drive of a user's personal computing device may have only a few hundred gigabytes (GBs) of excess storage capacity. Another benefit of storing digital information with an online content management service is that it provides resiliency to loss, theft, or failure of personal computing devices. For example, a user can have peace of mind knowing that if the user's laptop computer is lost, stolen, or breaks, the user does not lose the only copy of important documents, photos, etc. Yet another benefit of storing digital information with a content management service is that the information is available virtually anywhere there is network connectivity. For example, a user may be able to access a work document from her work computer and then continue working on the document at home using her laptop or tablet computer.
A benefit of storing digital information with an online content management service is also a potential drawback. In particular, a user may not be able to access their information without network connectivity (e.g., when the user is on an airplane). Even where network connectivity is available, access to information stored with the online content management service may be slow or unreliable or otherwise not in accord with the user's expectations.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.